


by his blood-red mast

by scioscribe



Category: The Lighthouse (2019)
Genre: Canon-Typical Tentacles, Eggpreg References, M/M, Original Mythology, Weird Biology, Weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 12:02:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21849358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: His deck was a throne, on the ocean lone, / And the sea was his park of pleasure, / Where he scattered in fear the human deer, / And rested—when he had leisure!
Relationships: Thomas Wake/Ephraim Winslow
Comments: 16
Kudos: 138
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	by his blood-red mast

**Author's Note:**

  * For [th_esaurus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/gifts).



> Title and summary from the song "The Sea King."

“What did he see in the light?”

Wake took his pipe from between his teeth. “Who’s that?”

“Your last keeper.”

“Never said he saw aught. He had ideas that grew fixed in his mind.”

“Then what were those?”

The salt cod was too rubbery to flake beneath Tommy’s fork, but, when pressed, it seemed to split and burst, like a lanced boil; the wet white flesh of the fish surfaced up between the tines. Little white-capped waves. He had not said one word about the food this whole time. He wanted this to be a clean month. He wanted his life smooth and straight-grained.

Wake said, “Do ye mean to eat that or just poke holes in it?”

“Eat it,” Tommy said. He put a bland forkful into his mouth. There was a white and watery puddle on the plate where that bite had been.

Wake didn’t answer his question.

He’d been washing the carved mermaid off in the sea. In the pearly gray light of the storage shed, he could see dried salt on her bones, but when he sucked her between his lips, what he tasted wasn’t just salt but spunk. Like he hadn’t been able to get her truly clean when all was said and done. She was bitter and heavy on his tongue, and when he came in his hand, he bit her. Made his teeth loosen in his gums.

He kept thinking about Wake’s nakedness, almost colorless in the glare of the light.

Wake’s cock. Tommy wanted to take it into his mouth while it was still soft. Everything on this little spit of land was hard or rough enough to scrape your skin off.

Wake would be soft. Just there, if nowhere else.

“You know that,” he whispered to the mermaid. “You know where you’re soft.” He ran his thumb up where he imagined the seam of her would be.

He slipped in, thumb and forefinger through the carving. She was wet inside—not wet like a woman but wet like the ocean, slick like the slime on the rocks. Tommy breathed in.

He licked his fingers when he took them out. She tasted like Wake’s prized lobsters, fishy and sweet with butter. There was no split in the figure where he could have dived into her.

Tommy rolled a cigarette.

“Look at it. Skinny as a matchstick, looking like a little brown cock.”

He wasn’t going to be baited into saying anything. He licked along the paper.

“Triton,” Wake said.

“What?”

“I’ve seen fatter cocks than that when I’m pissing,” Wake said. “Triton, lad. _Ephraim_.” The lamplight put half-curls of shine in his eyes, golden like sawdust. “Triton is what my last baby wickie found weighing on his mind. He’d been a sailor too, him.”

Tommy smoked. “What about Triton?”

“What about yer cock?”

He held out the cigarette. “You can try.”

Wake smiled at him; he had a wide mouth. Tommy wanted to lick against his teeth, polish them the way he’d polished the mermaid. Wake took the cigarette from his hand, and their fingers didn’t touch. He put what had been in Tommy’s mouth in his own.

“Too light,” Wake proclaimed. He ground it out in the gravy on his plate. He looked at Tommy with those frost blue eyes of his, mocking.

He was either going to have to roll another or get down on his knees. The storm rattled the windows.

“Triton owns the sea,” Wake said, and the moment was gone. “He pierces the bellies of ships where the sailors displease him. He sends his daughters out to put the smell of their cunts on the wind so they’ll drive men to rocks and ruin. We don’t keep the light to warn the ships, Ephraim Winslow, we keep it to sweeten Triton’s temper. We don’t pray for safe winds, we _pay_ for them. All that, my last wickie said. And all that’s true. But he never saw it right. He wasted himself—spent the duties he oughta been saving for the work and aye, for me.”

“What happened to his eye?”

Wake’s face turned wooden. “How’d ye come to know about his eye?” And then he belched and poured another drink. And the conversation drifted.

Vitreous fluid, the mermaid said. When the wickie took out his own eye. Sloppy and wet.

He’d refused the sea what it wanted, so it had taken even more.

The gull, though: the gull he’d killed hadn’t brought the storm. No dead sailor ruled over the sea. The one-eyed gull, a slack bloody bag in his hand, a stain on the cistern: that was what had taken his mind. His time.

If you sweeten the kerosene with honey, the ghost-gull said, it will go more smoothly.

But there was plenty of drink left, still.

In his dreams, the gull’s body was sometimes weighted with pearls: hard little stones that moved around between his fingers, like it was a supple leather sack stuffed full to bursting.

Their dance was done, and he could feel his eyelashes brush Wake’s skin when he blinked. There was a thrum in his head, loud as the horn; he pressed his mouth hard against Wake’s.

“There,” Wake said, almost tender now. “There, lad. I knew ye’d come to it.” He was kissing back, the taste of him as dank and quenching as the cistern water; Tommy wondered if any gull-blood had been there before him. Any other man’s tongue. The other wickie’s.

This wasn’t enough to make someone go mad, though. Tommy had done stranger things than this.

“It’s got to be given,” Wake said. “Else it’s not an offering.” His hands were cold against the nape of Tommy’s neck, and then he was unbuttoning his clothes. The pads of Wake’s fingers were smoother than his own, like a lady’s—lazy bastard—and there was no rasp as his hands slid over the wool.

Soon they were both bare and white and shivering. Wake’s muscles were strong but stringy, right up against the skin of his otherwise fleshless legs; his thighs and belly were slack and almost concave. The hair around his cock was a gingery brown. It felt like the brightest color Tommy had seen in weeks, and he got down on his knees before it.

Wake cupped his cheek. “Then here’s why ye ran to the sea. To the places where lonely men go.”

“You don’t know a goddamn thing about me.” He sucked against the soft skin inside Wake’s thigh. He’d leave a red-purple bruise there, Wake’s trapped blood lush as flowers, and it would somehow put paid to the worst of things, to this rock and him lugging the barrel up the stairs and breaking his back and Wake slapping him and making him drink and calling him lad, dog, _Ephraim Winslow_ ; it would pay a little for Wake’s fucking secrecy and his nagging and hardness. For Wake not touching him, till now, in any sort of kindness.

Tommy finally licked his cock and Wake almost growled at him. “Don’t play. Ye want it, so don’t go being coy like a whore.”

The skin was like velvet. He rubbed his cheek against it, smearing a little of Wake’s shine all up and down his jaw, and then he got to sucking.

“This is for us, now,” Wake said, in a kind of hoarse whisper. He had his hands in Tommy’s hair, not pulling it but stroking it. “We can have that. Pretty lad.”

The next time he took it out, the mermaid had Wake’s face. In his mouth, it had the taste of Wake’s cock, Wake’s come, which Wake hadn’t let him swallow; he’d scraped it from Tommy’s mouth with two fingers, gone to the door, and cast it out onto the wind.

The mermaid, if she still was that, had that notch in her again.

She said he’d have no trouble with his seagull now. He was theirs, and he'd be under their protection.

“They’re mules, you know,” Wake said. “Or almost.”

They were eating dinner. Lobster again. The mermaid lay on the table between them like a salt cellar; Wake gestured at it with one of the dark claws.

“Half of one and half of another. They can’t breed on their own. They’d die without us, and the sea would die without them.” He cracked open another claw. “They don’t ask so much, not when ye think about it. Only that we be good suitors, that way ye’d woo a girl or marry her. I’d have had ye settled down somewhere straight away, Tommy, if ye’d been a girl.”

He couldn’t remember telling Wake his name. The notch in the mermaid was glistening with come, though whether it was his or Wake’s, he couldn’t say. But his mind felt clear, like glass, and bright.

“Keep a clean house,” Wake went on. “Keep faithful. And never be tired. Never not be willing. But ye’ve got the makings of a good wickie and the stamina of a born fucking sailor.”

“What happened to the man before me?”

Wake filled his tin cup again with whiskey. “They made themselves known to him. But I told ye. He went mad. Abused himself worse than ye ever did and did it any place except where it was useful. Licked his seed off his fingers so they'd have none. When he was dead, I baited the lobster trap with him—and went back, day after day, to see what they’d been doing to him. Cut him throat to belly and glutted him with their roe. He was glistening with it. They were beautiful, Tommy. Like pearls.”

He didn’t want to see them. He needed to. He imagined cutting Wake in two, cutting himself. He could run his hands over Wake’s body and feel the pearls beneath his skin. Feel them roll, unnatural, against his tongue as he licked Wake’s skin.

The mermaid said that would happen, sooner or later. Wake was old. He wouldn’t always be potent enough to give them what they needed, so when the time came, they would take the last gift of his body. And Tommy could fuck him until the pearls ripened and swelled and made everything split. Wake wouldn’t need to die first, no, Wake would house them willingly. The culmination of a long marriage—and a chance to have his young lover in his arms, playing father to his mother.

Wake said, “He took out his eye at the end. He couldn’t rouse himself then, his cock was so chafed it bled when he touched it, but they'd have what they could of what he could spend, even so. It infected.”

Tommy said, “Would you really have married me if I’d been a woman?”

“As soon as I could get myself to whatever church would have me, pagan that I am.” He took a long drink and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Come on, Tommy, me lad. Let me show you the light.”

Wake turned Tommy’s body towards the lamp, the brilliant spinning glare of it. His mouth was hot against Tommy’s ear.

“They’ll come up on the waves and lap after ye,” Wake said. “Ye’ll make sirens. Ye’re half one already.”

They were both naked. One of Wake’s hands was on Tommy’s cock, pumping him; the other had slipped between Tommy’s buttocks, slick-fingered with Wake’s own come, and was opening up his ass. Things would happen, Wake had told him, between him and his visions. Between them.

The last man who’d fucked him had been Ephraim Winslow. Wake’s knuckles were hard as knots, bigger than Winslow’s, but his hands were like silk and cream.

When Tommy shook, letting go, his come spattered against the lamp. The heat made it pop against the glass.

The light swept out to sea, over and over, passing its white ribbon over the waves.

Wake was breathing hard against his shoulder.

A wet tendril reached around Tommy, curling around his cock, around his thighs. It tugged him over to look out at the water. More of those tentacles were holding him now; they went where Wake’s fingers had been. The waves were black except where the light fell. He leaned and kissed Wake. They stayed like that, half-locked together, as the night went on and the light revolved.

Out there, the storm was lifting. They could resupply. They could stay here, him and Wake, for as long as they needed to.


End file.
